The IF Reader of Science Fiction Page 10

  The airlock hissed. Ray Caradac came in, wearing his spacesuit against Sirius TV’s icy cold, but not the helmet—the planet was breathable.

  Mary was waiting. “I saw you coming through the gazer. How’d it go?”

  Ray grinned sourly as he zipped down the chest of his suit. Frost chipped off the metallic cloth. “I didn’t leave it out in the brush as I’d planned. Afraid an animal would get it. I waited until dark and then went to the village. They pull in their sidewalks early—not a soul stirring. I snuck in quiet as I could, and right in the middle of it the damned critter started squealing its fool head off. Familiar smells or something, I suppose. So I just set it down and walked dignifiedly out of the place. Don’t know whether anybody saw me, but I suspect they did. Damn—after all the trouble we went to landing way out here. I looked back at the edge of the brush, and there was a crowd around the lad.” He stepped out of the suit and turned to rack it by the airlock, wearing only the standard padded diaper affair. “Funny thing . . . I thought I saw a light flashing. A white light. But, hell, that’s impossible—unless they have wood that bums white on this clod. Maybe I was seeing things.”

  “Well, I certainly hope it’s all right,” Mary said. “Shame if they did kill it, poor little thing.”

  Ray stood a moment at the gazer, looking out at the moons-lit brush. “I hope so too, honey. Well”—he turned to the board—“let’s get out of here, and fast! Before Article 12, Section 9 fights its way right out of the book and jumps down our throats.” He paused as the A. G. unit caught, hummed loudly, then softly and steadily as they rose from Sirius IV. “I wonder if it will affect them.”

  It wasn’t until next planetfall, eight months later, that Ray noticed that his pencil-flash was missing from his spacesuit breast-pocket.

  He asked Mary about it and Mary thought startedly: “Not a nipple!” and said, not believing it, “Oh, it’ll turn up, one place or another.”

  Next darkness we hear noise. We see tall different one go away. The good gods bring my little one back! Priest come out. Everybody say you wrong. You lie. Gods not eat little one!

  Priest afraid. He say they bad gods. Bring little one back for sacrifice. They good, gods. Little one has cold fire in hand. He throw cold fire at priest. This new strange thing. God thing. It is a sign! We kill priest. Take him out for the animals to eat. I happy. Everybody like little one. He friend of good gods. Other mothers take care of him. Let him drink. Let other little ones drink. Do for each other, I happy because good gods bring him back

  to His people, and the

  First Night did ring with rejoicing; for He had returned from the Land Beyond the Sky and He said unto those who waited They are Good Gods, and I am Their Messenger, and lo! They have given to me a fragment of the Sun that I may shed light over darkness and open your eyes to good and gentle ways. And the false Priests said unto Him, Prove that you speak Truth; and in wrath He smote the Priests with the great light He carried, and lo! the false Priests were unmasked, and fled into the wilderness where they were devoured by wild beasts. Then the people cried, Welcome, and bade Him lead them; and He said, Care for me, my Children, until I am able. So He was anointed, and fed, and in two suns had grown to manhood; and then He led His People from the valley and taught them to love . . .

  “Always,” mused the young Galac Federation student. “Always they come to fill a need. But where do they come from? What really are their acts? Where do they go?” He closed the Sirian Bible and put it aside, and picked up another.

  Nat Cemp, a class C Silkie, awakened in his selective fashion, and perceived with the receptors that had been asleep that he was now quite close to the ship which he had first sensed approaching an hour before.

  Momentarily, he softened the otherwise steel-hard chitinous structure of his outer skin, so that the area became sensitive to light waves in the visual spectrum. These he now recorded through a lens arrangement that utilized a portion of the chitin for distance viewing.

  There was a sudden pressure in his body as it adjusted to the weakening of the barrier between it and the vacuum of space. He experienced the peculiar sensation of the stored oxygen in the chitin being used up at an excessive rate—vision was always extremely demanding of oxygen. And then, having taken a series of visual measurements, he hardened the chitin again. Instantly, oxygen consumption returned to normal.

  What he had seen with his telescopic vision system upset him. It was a V ship.

  Now the V’s, as Cemp knew, did not normally attack a full-grown Silkie. But there had been reports recently of unusual V activity. Several Silkies had been psychologically harassed. This group might conceivably discover where he was heading and use all their energy to prevent him.

  Even as he pondered whether to avoid them or to board them—as Silkies often did—he sensed that the ship was shifting its course ever so slightly in his direction. The decision was made for him. The V’s wanted contact.

  In terms of space orientation, the ship was neither up nor down in relation to him. But he sensed the ship’s own artificial gravity and adopted it as frame of reference. By that standard its approach was somewhat below him.

  As Cemp watched it with upper range perception that registered in his brain like very sharp radar blips, the ship slowed, made a wide turn and presently was moving in the same direction as he but at a slightly slower speed. If he kept going as he was, he would catch up with it in a few minutes.

  Cemp did not veer away. In the blackness of space ahead and below, the V ship grew large. He had measured it as being about a mile wide, half a mile thick and three miles in length.

  Having no breathing apparatus, obtaining his oxygen as he did entirely by electrolytic interchange, Cemp could not sigh. But he felt an equivalent resignation, a sadness at the bad luck that had brought him into contact with such a large group of V’s at so inopportune a time.

  As he came level with it, the ship lifted gently until it was only yards away. In the darkness on the deck below, Cemp saw that several dozen V’s were waiting for him. Like himself, they wore no spacesuits, for they were for the time being completely adjusted to the vacuum of space. In the near background, Cemp could see a lock that led into the interior of the ship. The outer chamber was open. Through its transparent wall he sensed the water that was inside.

  A basic longing in Cemp twinged with anticipatory pleasure. He reacted with a startled shudder, then thought in dismay: “Am I that close to the change?”

  Cemp, in the Silkie stage entirely a creature of space, settled awkwardly on the deck. The special bone structures that had once been legs were sensitive to molecular activity within solid masses; and so it was through energy interchanges within the bone itself that he felt himself touch the metal.

  In a sense, then, he stood there. But he balanced himself with energy flows, and not by any muscular contractions and expansions. There were no muscles. And it was with magnetic force that he attached himself to the deck, and with internal control that he moved, one after the other, the virtually solid blocks of highly differentiated bone.

  He walked forward like a two-legged being, feeling the stretch of the elasticized bone of his legs. Walking was an intricate procedure for him. It meant softening the tough bone each time, then rehardening. Although he had learned long ago how to walk, still he was slow. He who could streak through space at 50 G’s acceleration walked on the deck of the V liner at a mile an hour, and was happy that he could show a semblance of movement in such an environment.

  He walked to where the Vs stood, pausing a few feet from the nearest chunky figure.

  At first look, a V seemed to be a slightly smaller Sillde, but Cemp knew that these bitter creatures were Variants. V for Variant. It was always difficult to determine which type of V one was looking at. The differences were internal and not readily detectable.

  And so he had his first purpose: to establish the identity of the V’s on this ship.

  He utilized that function in his brain which, befor
e it was understood, had been labeled telepathy, to communicate his message. There was a pause, and then a V—who stood well back in the group—replied with the same communication method:

  “We have a reason, sir, for not identifying ourselves. And so we ask you to please bear with us until you understand our problems.”

  “Secrecy is illegal,” Cemp replied curtly.

  The answer was surprisingly free of the usual V hostility. “We are not trying to be difficult,” the V said. “My name is Ralden, and we want you to see something.”

  “What?”

  “A boy, now nine years old. He’s the V child of a Sillde and a breather, and he recently showed extreme variant qualities. We want permission to destroy him.”

  “Oh!” said Cemp.

  He was instantly disturbed. He had a fleeting awareness that his son, from his own first mating period, would now be nine.

  Relationship, of course, didn’t matter. Silkies never saw their children. His training required him to put all Sillde offspring on the same footing. But it was one of the nightmares of the uneasy peace that reigned among the ordinary humans, the Special People, and the two surviving classes of Silkies, that a high-ability V would show up some day in the unstable world of Variants.

  The fear had; proved unfounded. From time to time, Silkies who boarded V ships learned that some promising boy had been executed by the Vs themselves. Far from welcoming a superior child, the V’s seemed to fear that if allowed to become full-grown he would be a natural leader, and would threaten their freedom.

  The extermination of promising boys now required the permission of a Silkie, which explained the secrecy. If they didn’t obtain permission, they might still kill the youngster, trusting that the murder ship would never be identified.

  “Is that the reason?” Cemp demanded.

  It was.

  Cemp hesitated. He sensed within himself all that remarkable complex of sensations that meant that he was about to change. This was no time for him to spend a day or so aboard a V ship.

  Yet if he didn’t stay, it would be tantamount to granting permission for the execution, sight unseen. And that, he realized, could not be permitted.

  “You have done well,” he communicated gravely. “I shall come aboard.”

  The entire group of V’s moved along with him to the lock, huddling together as the great steel door rolled shut behind them, closing them away from the vacuum of space. The water came in silently. Cemp could see it exploding into gas as it poured into the utter emptiness in the lock, but presently, as the narrow space filled up, it began to hold its liquor form, and it roiled and rushed around everybody’s lower extremities.

  The feel of it was exquisitely pleasurable. Cemp’s bones kept softening automatically, and he had to fight to hold them hard. But when the water closed over the upper part of his body, Cemp let the living barrier that made up his outer skin grow soft. Because the feel of the water excited him, now that the change was so near, he had to exercise a conscious restraint. He wanted to suck the warm delightful liquid with visible enjoyment through the gills that were now being exposed. But it seemed to him that such a display of exuberance might give away his condition to the more experienced Vs.

  Around him, the Vs were going through the transformation from their space forms to their normal gill state. The inner lock opened, and the entire group swam through with a casual ease. Behind them, the inner lock door slid shut—and they were inside the ship itself, or rather in the first of the many big tanks that made up the interior.

  Cemp, using his vision now, looked around for identifying objects. But it was the usual dim watery world with transplanted sea life. Sea weeds swayed in the strong currents that—Cemp knew—were kept in motion by a powerful pumping system. He could feel the surge of the water at each impulse from the pumps. As always, he began to brace himself for that surge, accepting it, letting it become one of the rhythms of his life.

  II

  Cemp had no problems in this environment. Water was a natural element for him, and in the transformation from Silkie to human fish he had lost only a few of his Silkie abilities. All that Silkie inner world of innumerable sensations remained. There were nerve centers which, both separately and in combination, tuned in on different energy flows. In early days, they would have been called senses. But instead of the five to which, for so many centuries, human beings had limited their awareness, the Silkie could record 184 different kinds of sense-impressions over a wide range of intensity.

  There was an immense amount of internal “noise.” Incessantly stimulation poured in upon him. From his earliest days, control of what his sense receptors recorded had been the principal objective of his training and education.

  The water flowed rhythmically through his gills. Cemp swam with the others through a watery fairyland. It was a warm, tropical sea. As he looked ahead, he saw that the water universe was changing because of their approach. The coral was a new, creamier color. Ten thousand sea worms had withdrawn their bright heads into their tiny holes. Presently, as the group passed, they began to come out again. The coral turned orange, then purple and orange, then other shades of colors and combinations. It was one tiny segment of the submarine landscape.

  A dozen fishes in blues and greens and purples darted up the canyon. Their wild beauty was appealing. They were an old life form, Nature-evolved, untouched by the magic of scientific knowledge that had finally solved so many of the mysteries of life. Cemp reached with webbed fingers for a fish that darted close to him. It whirled away in a flurry of momentarily whitened waters. Cemp grinned happily, and the warm water washed into his open mouth—so far had he softened.

  He was already smaller. There had been a natural shrinkage from the tense, bony Silkie body. The new-forming muscles were contracted. The now-internalized bone structure was down to (a length of seven feet from a space-maximum of ten.

  Of the thirty-nine V’s who had come out to help persuade Cemp to board the ship, thirty-one—he learned by inquiry—were among the common variant types. The easiest state for them to be in was the fish condition in which they lived. They could be humans for brief periods, and they could be Silkies for periods that varied with these particular persons from a few hours to a week or so. All thirty-one had some control of energy in limited amounts.

  Of the remaining eight, three were capable of controlling very considerable energy, one could put up barriers to energy, and four could be breathers for extended periods of time.

  They were all intelligent beings, as such things were judged. But Cemp, who could detect on one or the other of his numerous receptor systems subtle body odors and temperatures in water and out, and read meaning into the set of bone and muscle, sensed from each of them a strong emotional mixture of discontent, anger, petulance and something even more intense: hatred. As he nearly always did with V’s, Cemp swam close to the nearest. Then, using a particularly resistant magnetic force line as a carrier—it held its message undistorted for a few feet only—he superimposed the question:

  “What’s your secret?”

  The V was momentarily startled. The reflex that was triggered into picking up the message was so on the ready that it put the answer onto a similar force line which, at that instant of time, was passing through its head in Cemp’s direction.

  And Cemp had the secret.

  Cemp grinned at the effectiveness that he could now force a conversation. He communicated: “No one threatens V’s individually or collectively. So why do you hate?”

  “I feel threatened!” was the sullen reply.

  “Since I know you have a wife—from your secret—do you also have children?”

  “Yes.”

  “Work?”

  “Yes.”

  “News, drama. TV? . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Sport?”

  “I watch it. I don’t participate.”

  They were passing through an underwater jungle. Huge, waving fronds, coral piled high, an octopus peer
ing at them from the shadows of a cave, an eel hissing and then darting away and fish by the dozen—it was still the wild part of the ship, where the tropical conditions of an Earth ocean were duplicated. To Cemp, who had been nearly a month in space without a break, swimming here seemed like great sport indeed.

  But all he said was, “Well, friend, that’s all there is for anyone. A quiet enjoyable existence is the most that life has to offer. If you’re envying me my police duties, don’t! I’m inured to it, but I only have a mating period every nine arid a half years. Would you care for that?”

  The implication in his statement, that Silkies could only have sex at intervals of nine years or so, was not true. But it was a myth that Silkies and their closest human allies, the Special People, had found it worthwhile to foster. Normal human beings particularly seemed to find great satisfaction in what they conceived to be a major defect in the otherwise enviable Silkie.